her leg up, twisted it around onto the kitchen worktop and did a ballet/stretchy thingy.
That’s it, my appetite was completely gone now. Mainly because I knew that if I so much as attempted that manoeuvre my kidneys would fall out, my skin would burst like an overripe marrow and I’d need stitches in my secret garden.
‘Right, it’s been a wee slice of heaven, but I need to go. Benson & Hedges, the ironing and children are calling.’
‘Where is my gorgeous little Benny the Ball today?’ asked Carol. I know, how rude! He might have a slight weakness for extra puddings, but a space-hopper he was not.
‘He started nursery yesterday. I’ve to collect him at three.’
‘Oh no,’ said Kate, in a doom-laden voice. My head spun around to face her as inwardly I groaned. Dear God, don’t let one of her muscles have snapped or her back have frozen in that position. Her legs were still at a ninety-degree angle to each other, and if we had to take her to hospital in that position then one limb was going to have to go out through the sunroof.
‘What’s wrong?’ I asked fearfully.
‘You’re not getting wild jungle sex,’ she stated.
I appreciated the recap on my love life but was pretty sure we’d already moved on from that subject.
‘And nothing is going on work-wise to make you remotely inspired or enthusiastic.’
Correct. Did she want to see me cry?
‘And Benny has just started nursery.’
Look, didn’t I just say that?
‘Carly, you know what’s going on, don’t you? You, my darling, are suffering from acute non-stimulation of the neural passageways and cranial cavity.’
‘What?’
She laughed. ‘You’re bored! Out of your head. Off your tits. Restless. Fed-up. Your va-va-voom has vucked off.’
I processed this for a minute. How could I be bored? I had a house to run, a book to write, a husband to manipulate into giving up sexual favours, two demanding children to be fed, watered and diverted from a life of crime, friends that did bloody yoga…Oh, shite, she was right. I was bored rigid.
Where was the excitement? Where was the adrenalin rush? Where was that little flutter of anticipation when I woke up each morning wondering what the day would bring? Bored. Rigid. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d been this bored.
‘I remember the last time you were this bored,’ piped up psychic Carol, scaring the crap out of me. The day that Carol got in touch with the thoughts and feelings of another woman was the day that the skies would be awash with large pink animals that snorted and whiffed of bacon.
‘It was right before you left,’ she continued. ‘You know, before you did the whole mid-life crisis, desperate cow, psycho stalker, any port in a shower thing.’
Well put, I thought. She was right. Much as I cringed with embarrassment at the thought.
Okay, so here it is–the thing I alluded to earlier that should really only be mentioned after I’m dead, when my body has been handed over for medical research and the scientists are dissecting my brain in a bid to understand the primitive behaviour of deluded, hormone-fuelled, biological-clock-powered women.
You see, I once made a huge cock-up. Massive. Mortifying. Actually there were several. About a year before I met Mark at the wedding, I had what can only be called a mental aberration. At that time I was single, in a job I hated (selling toilet rolls–you couldn’t make it up), living in a grotty rented flat and generally discontented with where my life had gone. Especially when it had at one time shown so much promise. In the preceding ten years, I’d worked in London, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, and Shanghai. I’d visited New York and Ireland. I’d had wild, crazy jobs managing nightclubs in some of the most exotic places on earth. I’d met some amazing people, I’d been engaged six times, I’d bought gorgeous clothes, and I’d earned and spent a fortune…
Nope, even when I hide it in the middle there it still sticks out like a nun in an S&M basement. I got engaged six times. Two informal promises and four full-blown sparkly-rings-phone-the-vicar ones.
Yet there I was, at the end of it all, living on my lonesome and existing on ready meals for one. And if Ashif had known me then, his family would be going to Barbados twice a year.
So I did the sane, rational thing–I made a plan. Sadly, that’s where the ‘sane and rational’ bit ended. I quit my job, relinquished the lease on my flat, grabbed my credit cards and went off round the world to find all the guys I’d been engaged to just in case any of them really had been Mr Right and I’d been too busy signing up as a certified commitment-phobic to notice. It was insane, deranged, desperate and a bigger disaster than George Bush’s contribution to world peace. The ignominy of the memories is too hard to bear, so I’ll give you the pamphlet edition as opposed to War and Peace. Or should I say the Nipple Alert version, as the following story provided shame, embarrassment, disaster, and the plot for my first novel.
First there was Nick, the man who’d taken my virginity on a hot night in Benidorm. Actually, ‘taken’ isn’t strictly true. I’d lobbed it at him at the approximate speed of an Olympic javelin. But when I rediscovered him in a restaurant in St Andrews, we discovered we had all the sexual tension of custard. Luckily, Sarah was with me, and they fell in love, married and when we’re all together now I manage to blank out the fact that I know what his penis looks like.
Then there was Joe, a nightclub owner in Amsterdam. By the time I tracked him down he was a millionaire entrepreneur and paragon of chic–and so camp he made Elton John look like Vinnie Jones’s harder brother.
Next was Doug, who, ironically, dumped me first time around because he caught me shagging Mark–in the days when Mark didn’t think a libido was one of those inflatable things you lie on in the pool on holiday. Anyway, second time around Doug proved that he had the thirst for vengeance of a Sicilian mob boss and totally humiliated me, so I was forced to move on to…
Tom. Bless him. An Irish farmer with the body of a Greek God. By the time I found him again he was happily married and had the body of a Greek taxi driver called Stavros who existed on ten thousand calories a day.
Then there was Phil. A complete honey, who was my Shanghai Surprise–never more so than when I discovered that he’d become a big name on the American comedy circuit and had married Lily, the beautiful flower who’d worked with me in a nightclub in deepest darkest Shanghai.
So that left all my hopes pinned on Sam. Sam Morton. The martial arts expert who I fell madly in love with when I lived in Hong Kong. The one that I knew, just knew, was right for me when I set eyes on him again all those years later. The one who adored me, who said he’d prayed every moment for me to return to him–that is, when he wasn’t really busy doing other things, like shagging half the wealthy female population of South East Asia. Oh, yes, Sam had become a gigolo. A hooker. A man who could fucky-fucky-long-time for mucho dinaro. And thereafter I couldn’t look at him without thinking ‘wire brush and disinfectant’. And believe me, I tried. I even agreed to a holiday on a paradise island to heal our tortured relationship. Result? Loads of sun, sea, sand…and a clitoris that spent the whole time on its own little vacation. Yep, the passion was officially gone, replaced by friendship. Platonic friendship.
So
